Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli, Elisabeth Jaquette (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A taut and concise work of fiction. Shibli strikes a balance of saying exactly what needs to be said to advance the plot while perfectly placing just the right amount of pause so the reader can absorb the gravity of the story.

A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people

Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229074
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	29,812
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Adania Shibli (1974, Palestine) has been writing novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays, which were published in various anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines in different languages. Her latest novel Minor Detail was published in the US by New Directions in 2020, in a translation by Elisabeth Jacquette, and has been translated into many languages, most recently into German (published by Berenberg Verlag). Minor Detail was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic and Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

Editorial Reviews

05/18/2020

Shibli’s startling, cinematic novel (after Touch) centers on crimes against Palestinians in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War and in the present. In August 1949, a group of Israeli soldiers enters the Negev, a desert region in southern Israel, led by an unnamed maniacal officer who’s secretly suffering from a venomous bug bite. The soldiers ambush and kill a group of unarmed Bedouins, then return to their camp with the sole survivor, a young Arab woman whose tragic fate is tied to the officer’s rapidly deteriorating state. In the 2000s, a Palestinian woman in the West Bank reads an article about these events and becomes obsessed with learning more after realizing they occurred 25 years to the day before she was born. Borrowing a colleague’s ID card to leave the West Bank and enter Israel, despite her fear of borders, which “shake and destabilize me to the point that I can no longer fathom what is permissible and what is not,” she heads to the site of the crime. Shibli’s masterly, acidic work of subtle symbolism and plot symmetry gives no access to the thoughts of the Israeli soldiers or their victim, making the Palestinian woman’s subsequent first-person narration all the more arresting. This is a remarkable exercise in dramatizing a desire for justice. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A palpable sense of dread pulses beneath Minor Detail. In Elisabeth Jaquette’s fine translation from Arabic, Shibli asks how we can account for and understand major crimes, by looking more closely for the details that escape."

Prospect Magazine

"The power in the syntax and diction—the pulsing lyricism in its raw realities—reminds me of how central poetry is to the prose of Palestinian storytellers."

Bookforum - Sarah Schulman

"Minor Detail can be read as the blackest of black comedies, in orbit about tragedy as rings around a dark planet. The abject is the centre of gravity here, and we may only approach so close before words themselves are crushed."

The Sydney Morning Herald

"Adania Shibli’s exceptional novel Minor Detail belongs to the genre of the novel as resistance, as revolutionary text. Simultaneously depicting the dehumanisation that surrounds rape and land-grab, it is a text that palpitates with fear and with outrage. As we join the nameless young woman in her quest to find the truth of a long-forgotten atrocity, we realize how dangerous it is to reclaim life and history in the face of ongoing, systematic erasure. The narrative tempo, that eventually reaches a crescendo, astutely captures how alienation and heightened anxiety are elemental states of living under Israeli occupation. This is the political novel we have all been waiting for."

Meena Kandasamy

"Adania Shibli takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key event in her novel – the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman – to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators – an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale – but her method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches its heart-stopping conclusion."

J. M. Coetzee

"A mind-changing revelation of how the past and the present converge on Palestinian life, achieved through craft, character voice, and time travel expertly realized by the author."

Bookforum - Porochista Khakpour

"Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory or whodunit—a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers—it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma....For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue durée of ennui and isolation rather than the dramatic moment of crisis."

New York Review of Books - Robyn Creswell

"In Adania Shibli's subversively quiet, compelling Minor Detail, threads of connection are embodied in a young woman's quest to find almost erased history. Written in spare, careful language (praise also to translator Elisabeth Jaquette), Shibli helps reclaim what would be obliterated by forces actively at work yet today, doing so with a narrative masterfully carrying both surprise and inevitability within. This book has devastation and loss to a shattering, wrenching degree, and yet. Yes, and yet."

Elliott Bay Book Company - Rick Simonson

"An intense and penetrating work about the profound impact of living with violence—Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet control."

The Choreography of Violence: On Adania Shibli’s “Minor Detail” - Los Angeles Review of Books - Katie da Cunha Lewin

"A short but powerful novel. Shibli interrogates a world of unstable and shifting boundaries and borders, from the Negev Desert a year after the 1948 war to a contemporary version of the tightly controlled lands of Palestine and Israel. Dreamlike, haunting prose."

World Literature Today

"An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion, and formal virtuosity."

Pankaj Mishra

"This short book got under my skin when I first read it and has haunted me ever since. The austere prose in this magnificent translation throws a pitiless, impassive air over every page, where murder is dealt with as impersonally as a pack of chewing gum."

Words Without Borders - Leri Price

"Shibli crafts a story that connects strangers to one another through the occupation that has shaped their lives. Nerve-racking and eye-opening."

Arab News

"An explosive double-telling of a single crime story.... The extreme economies of Shibli's style—blending aphorism and enigma, dry humor and searing critique—recall the novellas of César Aira and Mario Bellatin. In the act of writing such an evocative, tightly wrought fiction, in her invention of such a complex, fighting character who is at once the victim’s double and the author’s stand-in, Shibli not only reflects the deadening conditions of occupation. She also, crucially, transcends the damage they have done."

4Columns

"Shibli has created a powerful set of dual heroines, women wracked with disquiet and violence, resisting the frames that have first, been chosen for them, then denied to have ever existed. This is an astonishing, major book."

Lithub - John Freeman

"A quiet, searching, precise observer—Adania Shibli deserves to be better known."

Qantara.de

"What links these two stories? Borders, of course, but also some weird echoes. The woman from Ramallah sneaks into Israel to find out more, for there may be 'nothing more important than this little detail, if one wants to arrive at the complete truth.’  Shibli delicately suggests that the 'complete truth' of the crime [in Minor Detail] might never be found out, that perhaps the details in the two stories mirror each other because the past isn’t even past."

Four Social Novels in Translation Consider the World’s Ills - The New York Times Book Review - Yu Miri

"A blistering allegory about state violence and the conscription of women’s bodies. In its minor details, Shibli's novel offers a piercing account of everyday life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is superb. Minor Detail is a credo for revolution, a major book: tense, propulsive and timely."

The Saturday Paper - Emily Stewart

"The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smouldering, until it is shining off the page...The book is, at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good."

The Guardian

"The dead are ever present in Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail. Indirectly through multiple narrators, Shibli constructs a meditation on brutality, war, memory and the collective suffering of the Palestinian people in this chilling novel in which the legacy of violence remains unresolved."

The Observer - Lauren LeBlanc

"[A] harrowing account of a crime that takes place in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war known as the Nakba (catastrophe or disaster) to Palestinians...Anyone interested in better understanding life in the Occupied Territories needs to read this powerful tale."

Lit Hub - John Fulton

"Like an affidavit in its egalitarian specificity—every detail of every character’s action is accounted for, and therefore scrutinized. A starkly poetic accounting of a crime, its burial, and its exhumation."

Community Bookstore - Alia Persico-Shammas

"The most talked-about writer on the West Bank."

Ahdaf Soueif

"Palestinian Adania Shibli’s cinematic novel stages a return of the repressed on a national scale by reposing an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in the Negev region in 1949. An unflinching account of violence and dehumanisation—Shibli breaks new ground. She uses a lyrical, intensely sensory mode to describe how we identify with figures from the past, and especially the restless dead. Brutal, hypnotic and haunting."

The Monthly - Mireille Juchau

‘All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed.’
— Fatima Bhutto, Guardian

‘A sophisticated, oblique novel about empathy and the urge to right wrongs’
— Anthony Cummins, Observer

‘An intense and penetrating work about the profound impact of living with violence—Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet control.’
— Katie da Cunha Lewin, Los Angeles Review of Books

‘This is probably my novel of the year so far.’
— Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail

‘Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory or whodunit—a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers–it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma ... For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue duree of ennui and isolation rather than a dramatic moment of crisis.’ 
— New York Review of Books

From the Publisher